From the Deep of the Dark (43 page)

Outside the thermal barrier the same class of metal war machines the gill-necks used to entangle the Jackelian convoy’s flagship had surfaced. Starfish! They were spinning around, launching ordinance up and over the thermal barrier. Daunt wasn’t sure what they were throwing across the barrier protecting the island from the ocean, but he was certain it meant no good for their chances of keeping the city in human hands. Daunt passed the telescope across to Morris and the old Jackelian adventurer swore under his breath.

‘Do you recognize what they are tossing over the barrier?

‘Our fleet sea arm call them rolling-pins, on account of what the buggers look like,’ said Morris. ‘Landing boats, good for crossing the seabed and advancing up a shore. A big steel tube with caterpillar tracks on either end, spiked with guns and lances. I wouldn’t want to be one of the Court’s soldiers dug in on the beach – they’ll do a roll and crush job on their positions down there.’

‘I trust the city’s walls will hold the machines at bay?’

Morris shrugged. ‘They’re not much good as a ram against walls this thick and high, but they won’t need to be. Each rolling pin will be carrying thirty to fifty gill-necks, depending how tight they’ve packed their marines in. There’ll be sappers with explosive charges, snipers, grenadiers, and portable artillery pieces and assault troops pounding on our walls within the hour.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘We’ve lost our big guns up there as well as our Jack Cloudies. There’ll be too many rolling-pins coming in for the few u-boats the island’s got patrolling inside the barrier to pick even a fraction of the armour off.’

‘What would you say a realistic estimation of our chances are?’

Morris patted his gas-rifle. ‘With these fancy shooting irons, we’ve got seven or eight times the gill-necks’ rate of fire, but—’ he indicated the citizenry lined up along the battlements, ‘—you’re talking about one of the world’s great powers lining up against us out there. The Nuyokians are a game bunch, but they’re not professional soldiers, they’re farmers and shopkeepers with guns and a couple of weeks’ militia training every year. Even with the Court’s soldiers as our backbone, we’re outnumbered a thousand to one. So what are our chances, vicar? I would say our bun’s been well and truly baked. It’s not if we fall, it’s when.’

Daunt felt his soul shrivel at the ex-soldier’s estimation of their odds.
We have to buy Charlotte and the commodore the time to reach the seed-city.

Morris pulled back the safety bolt of his rifle. ‘On the plus side, I’m going to get my choice of Advocacy heads to put bullets into. One for every day the arseholes had me as their slave, see. You might want to be getting off the wall sharpish.’

‘A priest’s training includes physical healing, as well as tending to our parishioners’ souls and mental wellbeing.’

Morris pointed down to the aid station tents set up close to the wall, rows of stretchers and tables bearing bone saws and tubs of boiling tar to quickly seal wounds, all lined up incongruously across the neat lawns of the nearest row of hexagonal buildings. ‘There’ll be work for you soon enough, then.’

His words were cut short by the wailing of sirens coming from inside the town, no obvious sign of the source, but the noise seemed to shake through the transparent streets from every point.

One of the nearby locals tapped his nose and indicated his gas mask. ‘Air, for face.’

Morris pulled down the gas mask on the back of his helmet and Daunt followed suit.

‘There she goes.’ Morris’s voice sounded muffled beneath the ceramic air drum and rubber visor, great clouds of yellow-tinged gas seeping down from midway up the volcano’s slopes, rolling across the shore and making a fog across the sea. Whatever damage had been inflicted inside the crater, the Court’s facilities were intact enough to release their final defensive barrier. As a cornered squid releases a mist of ink, so the volcano was putting out the shroud of poisonous death that accompanied a genuine eruption. Flags lifted up along the wall to monitor the direction the wind was blowing. Luckily for the city, the breeze seemed to be carrying the poison gas along the shoreline and out to sea. Unfortunately for the islanders, Daunt mused, the Advocacy fleet wasn’t a convoy of merchantmen chancing their luck against the Isla Furia’s ferocious reputation. The landing force would no doubt be wearing water breathers, and the poison gas would be of nuisance value only. It did have the effect of concealing the Court’s defences along the shoreline, though. When the initial sounds of battle began to drift across the lake, the sights of the fighting were completely enveloped by high waves of rolling poison. Along the beach, different strands of coloured smoke began to mix with the yellow war gas, trenches laying down smoke cover, other forces signalling with smoke canisters. The two massive cannons behind the city walls responded to the coded signals, pounding out volley after volley, the results of their work hidden from view, but audible from the distant whoop of detonations. It was a surreal sight, the mist and clouds veined as though a rainbow, all sounds of conflict distorted by it. The distant fighting continued for over an hour and there seemed no let up in the gas – as if the volcano – having its fire silenced, was pouring all its fury into this boundless toxic veil.

Signalling the collapse of the shore’s defensive line, the lake’s ocean lock burst open in a massive explosion, pieces of concrete blown across the lake, a deadly shower of wreckage sweeping across the battlements. A second after the detonation, the screams of pain and terror from the defenders who had taken the shockwave reached Daunt. Some townspeople had been flung off the wall, others maimed and ripped apart. Behind the city’s wall, one of the clean gleaming white porcelain towers stood with its top two storeys shaved off by the scythe of rubble.

‘This is how it begins,’ whispered Daunt. Then he shook himself. It was almost as if he had been possessed by the old gods again when he had spoken.

‘Reckon you’re not wrong,’ said Morris, resting his rifle on the battlements. There were two little metal legs underneath the barrel, and he had opened them up to rest the gun against the stone, swivelling the stock experimentally. ‘You been through anything like this before?’

‘Jago,’ said the ex-parson. ‘I was on Jago when it was invaded.’

‘Then you know what to expect.’

‘I presume you’ve tasted similar when you were in the regiments?’

‘Once.’

‘So you showed the good wit to get out,’ said Daunt. ‘Sickened by the senselessness of it all?’

‘That wasn’t why I deserted,’ said Morris. The convict’s body language closed up. ‘Eyes front. They’re coming. Can you smell them? Can you taste them? Bloody gill-necks.’

Out towards the sea the wind had changed direction, war gas drifting across the lake, providing the advancing Advocacy forces with a haze screen of cover. The Court’s own deadly cloud was working against them now. Daunt saw a couple of runners outside the battlements, sprinting down the ground between the wall and near shore of the lake, pegging small triangular pennants into the dirt.
The effective killing range of our rifles, so our defenders don’t expend ammunition needlessly.
There wasn’t much cover in the stretch of land between the lake and the city – wooden jetties for fishing boats, a few shacks for storing nets, eeling skiffs lying beached in the reeds. Apart from the runners desperately marking out the ground, the rest of Nuyok were sheltering behind their town’s thick, tall walls.

Daunt quickly tipped up his gas mask and wiped the salty sweat off his forehead before it could sting his eyes again. Even the wind on the island was hot, playing against his skin as if it had been blown off the coals of a Jackelian tavern’s fireplace. Matters were about to get devilishly hotter. Out on the border of the lake, a rhythmic clanking filled the air as hundreds of rolling-pin tanks began to rise up out of the lime-coloured waters, tracks at either end of the metal vehicles dragging them off the lake bed and up onto the surface. Almost before the landing craft had cleared the surface, the guns studding their armour spewed out a hail of fire. They were moving up in a coordinated assault formation – some halting for hatches at their rear to fall down and disgorge marines, others coming to a standstill in the shadows of the battlements, dozens of weapons bristling up on their maximum elevation and peppering the battlements with shot and shell. These soldiers had come for the long haul, bulbous crystal helmets filled with water connected by hoses to their version of rebreather packs, bodies weighted down with pouches and entrenchment equipment. Protected by the initial landing force, more rolling-pin armour emerged out of the lake waters. Some were dragging spherical cargo containers, others mounted with trench digging prows and siege machinery. The appearance of this assault was met by a hail of fire from the Nuyokians, the roar of their rifles firing a thousand baby rattles shaking in anger. It resounded across the lake like no gunfire Daunt had ever heard before. Not the wood-like splinter of explosive charges being ignited and discarded manually, but a hollow thwacking as the firing bolts in the side of rifles jolted back and forth with the discharge of super-compressed gas. The defenders’ furious response was accompanied by a clockwork clack of ammunition drums rotating on top of the rifles as the city’s militiamen emptied their magazines down onto the ground in front of their home. A fierce drumming echoed from the rolling-pin tanks as rifle balls glanced off their armour. Where the gill-neck marines were out in the open, unloading their siege and entrenching tools from the landing craft, soldiers’ corpses spilled into the dirt and crumpled back into the lake’s reeds.

Behind Daunt, the two long guns of the city were still discharging every few minutes, tossing shells at the stalled battle fleet of the Advocacy as fast as the city gunners could reload shells into the breeches. Daunt ducked as a spray of shots whistled past his head. Morris was keeping down, swivelling his gas gun on its leg mounts and aiming careful bursts at the invaders below, laughing as if the vista of carnage below was a theatre production laid on purely for his amusement. At the receiving end of each spray of bullets, Advocacy soldiers collapsed to the ground with shattered breathing helmets, their crab-shell armour torn and holed. Elements of the landing force were trying to storm the slopes of the volcano, no doubt trying to find elevated positions from where they could shell and snipe at the city below. Fortunately for the Nuyokians, the close-defence mechanisms of the Court of the Air were coming into play. Fake rock fronts were drawing back all across the mountain side, cannons, mortars and banks of rapid-fire rifles emerging into the light of day from camouflaged bunkers, cutting down each wave of Advocacy marines as they attempted to scale the rise.

Stretcher-bearers ran crouched along the length of the battlements, rolling collapsed bodies onto stretchers and manhandling them down the steps towards the surgeons’ tents on the lawns of the nearest towers.

All around Daunt the defenders were intent on murder, focused on killing enough gill-necks for the Advocacy to abandon its beachhead
. This is your war, Jethro Daunt, and welcome to it.
He bent down and went off to see how many of the wounded he could save.

D
ick and Sadly stood in the shadows of an alleyway, occupying one of the narrow passages between the imposing marble facades of the capital’s moneyed districts, a wide boulevard disgustingly well-lit by gas lamps even in the middle of the night. As head of the State Protection Board, Algo Monoshaft was entitled to a grace and favour residence supplied by the state. In this case, a series of rooms atop Victory Arch.

Dick had always considered it fitting that the civil servant charged with the protection of the realm from its enemies should be ensconced inside a monument built to celebrate Parliament’s victory in the civil war.
If me and Sadly get in there alive, who knows, maybe the old arsehole’ll continue doing the job.
That didn’t mean Dick failed to begrudge Algo Monoshaft his polished walnut floors and his servants and his expensive antiques and every penny of the luxuries he enjoyed while Dick had shivered in the cold comfort of Damson Pegler’s cheap boarding rooms. Perched in gilded opulence atop the ceremonial gateway’s four arches. Well, at least Dick knew where to find the senile sod, even if it was in the lap of state-patronized luxury. They might have had an easier job of it, if the head had lived in Steamtown with the majority of the capital’s other steammen. But Algo Monoshaft was living high on his perks, so here the head was, and across there Dick and Sadly would have to go.

Sadly checked outside the alley. ‘Nobody watching that I can see, but that doesn’t mean they’re not out there to get us.’

‘Oh, they’re watching all right,’ said Dick. ‘Walsingham isn’t going to let anyone he doesn’t trust within a country mile of the old steamer.’

‘They can’t all be sea-bishops across there,’ said Sadly. ‘They don’t have the bleeding numbers to impersonate everyone, says I.’

Dick cradled the heft of the Court’s heavy gas rifle. It was a queer-looking weapon, but it’d plough a furrow through anyone standing between him and the master of the board. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s an execution warrant out on the both of us. If there’s dustmen inside the arch, they’ll cut our throats first and ask questions later. Won’t have time to separate intentions inside there.’

‘Well then, Mister Tull, some good men are likely to die for a misguided cause.’

Sadly’s rodent-like features were darting about and he looked like he was ready to sprint out to the cover of the nearest building, but Dick laid a hand on the Court agent’s shoulder. ‘We’re not going to run up to the front and shake scullery windows looking for a way in. If it’s an assault you’re after, we could’ve landed that aerostat of yours on the roof and kicked in a skylight.’

‘How then?’

‘I don’t know what trade-craft they taught you in the Court, but me, I was taught by good old Sergeant Childers back in the day. I’d say he was a grim old bugger, except I think I’ve turned into him.’ Dick led Sadly down the narrow passage and into a small square off the side. There was an oblong of grass bounded by seats on four sides, the kind of place clerks and clackers would come during their lunch to sit and stare at the prestigious volume of pigeon droppings painting the marble statues lining the path. ‘Always good for a lesson, was Childers, and a kicking if his education didn’t stick in the head of the young fools palmed off onto him to train.’ Dick approached a life-sized statue of a man clutching the pommel of a great sword with two mailed hands. He eased himself behind it enough to slip his fingers towards a shadow on the statue’s back, twisting his hand around an awkward angle to reach inside the hidden shelf – feeling for the cobweb-ridden rusting lever he had once been shown. ‘Lessons like never enter somewhere you haven’t located the back door.’ As Dick twisted the lever, the statue ground forward on its plinth, revealing a square well with a metal ladder riveted into the shaft. ‘And a back door can be a front door too, when you don’t want to be seen going in.’
Maybe I would have shown it to that young oaf William before I’d retired. Not that Billy-boy would’ve listened.
He hadn’t thought there was much that Dick knew worth the passing on.